IR-UWB transmitter

Abstract

A generator of very short pulses where a cascade of inverters of arbitrary length characterized in that said inverters are adapted to produce pulses on their power supply line instead of their usual output.

The invention claimed is: 
     
       1. A Pulse Generator comprising a cascade of inverters of arbitrary length characterized in that said inverters comprise an input, an output, and a power supply line and are adapted to produce pulses on the power supply line instead the output; and characterized in that the pulses produced on the power supply line are collected by a device such as a transformer for transferring, combining, or weighting the pulses, wherein said combination and weighting serving to create an arbitrary signal. 
     
     
       2. Pulse generator according to  claim 1  and said cascade of inverters whereof is constituted of two types of inverters together forming a basic cell in which they alternate in the cascade: comprising a high power large inverter responsible for producing the pulse and a low power small inverter for driving the large inverters that follows it and for assuring an identical polarity for one stage to another. 
     
     
       3. Pulse generator according to  claim 2  and said high power inverters whereof are sufficiently large to produce the pulse of required amplitude, said high-power inverters having a variable power supply voltage independent of the voltage of the small inverters in order to enable adjustment of the power of the pulse. 
     
     
       4. Pulse generator according to  claim 2  and said low-power inverters whereof are sufficiently small to have a negligible power consumption at the same time as being capable of driving the subsequent larger inverter, said inverters having a variable power supply voltage independent of the voltage of the large inverters in order to modify the centre frequency of the signal. 
     
     
       5. Pulse generator according to  claim 2  and characterized in that the output pulses are produced by the transitions of the input excitation signal that are reflected in the power supply line of said large inverters, in order to have a maximum efficiency of the circuit. 
     
     
       6. Pulse generator according to  claim 2  and characterized in that the basic cell may be cascaded and sized to produce a succession of pulses spaced by a time determined by the power supply voltage of the small inverter in the cell. 
     
     
       7. Pulse generator according to  claim 1  and characterized in that the cascade may be either open (linear) to generate a signal in the form of pulses or closed on itself (ring oscillator) to generate a periodic signal. 
     
     
       8. Pulse generator according to  claim 2  and characterized in that there may be three inverters in a cell to assure an odd number of inverters in a ring oscillator closed configuration. 
     
     
       9. Pulse generator according to  claim 1  and characterized in that the pulses are combined by two, three or more channels to obtain two-phase, three-phase and multiphase signals, respectively. 
     
     
       10. Pulse generator according to  claim 1  and characterized in that the transformer is employed to create the polarity of the output signal from unipolar logic gates and thus to benefit from the maximum possible speed by optimizing the speed of the latter.